Forrester’s Infrastructure and Operations research team has been on the leading edge of infrastructure technology and its proper operational aspects for years. We pushed the industry on both the supply side (vendors) and the demand side (enterprises) toward new models and we pushed hard. I’m proud to say we’ve been instrumental in changing the world of infrastructure and we’re about to change it again!

As the entire technology management profession evolves into the Age of the Customer, the whole notion of infrastructure is morphing in dramatic ways. The long-criticized silos are finally collapsing, cloud computing quickly became mainstream, and you now face a dizzying variety of infrastructure options. Some are outside your traditional borders – like new outsourcing, hosting and colocation services as well as too many cloud forms to count. Some remain inside and will for years to come. More of these options will come from the outside though, and even those “legacy” technologies remaining inside will be created and managed differently.

Your future lies not in managing pockets of infrastructure, but in how you assemble the many options into the services your customers needs. Our profession has been locally brilliant, but globally stupid. We’re now helping you become globally brilliant. We call this service design, a much broader design philosophy rooted in systems thinking. The new approach packages technology into a finished “product” that is much more relevant and useful than any of the parts alone.

Forrester’s Playbook model has been proclaimed as a pragmatic way of packaging the advice you need to drive your own future directions. In the infrastructure space, the future is nothing short of a radical transformation. To kick-start this new era for I&O professionals, we introduce you to:

The  Infrastructure Transformation Playbook

We suggest you begin with the Executive Overview report and then drill down into the various reports for each Playbook module. Most of the Infrastructure Transformation Playbook is now in place and the remaining reports will all be completed by the first quarter of calendar year 2015. Because this world will be constantly changing, this Playbook will be too. We will refresh the entire Playbook each year, and when appropriate, discard the entire thing. When market conditions warrant it – not if – this Playbook will itself transform. In fact, this Playbook instantly obsoletes the IT Infrastructure Playbook that is barely more than a year old.

Prepare for a wild and exciting ride through your own Infrastructure Transformation. It’s going to be exhilarating and at times, terrifying, but we are here to help you through it. Together, we will all change the world! What’s not to love about that?!